Bushman's Hole
Marooned: Tales of the Catastrophically Lost
Aaron Habel & Jack Luna
4.9 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On January 8th, 2005, Australian diver David Shaw attempted to retrieve the body of Deon Dreyer, who had died in Bushman's Hole, an 886-foot-deep cave in South Africa in 1994. Shaw ultimately reached the body, but became entangled and died on the cave floor, leaving his friend and support diver, Don Shirely, to fight for survival.
Sources:
The Guardian: Deepest Sympathy
Dave Not Coming Back | FULL DOCUMENTARY
VIDEO: To Boldly Go | David Shaw
The Aftermath Of Love: Don Shirley and Dave Shaw
Death in the depths: the divers willing to pay the price of taking sport to extremes
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm not switching my team to some fancy work platform that somehow knows exactly how we work. |
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| 0:28.5 | love to use. If I told you that I had a dream to go swimming deep into a dark hole, hundreds of feet into the earth, with a powerful light to illuminate the cramped spaces until I reached the floor of this hole, nearly a thousand feet below the surface, and there were dead bodies down there waiting for me, would you say that I had a dream I was looking to fulfill? |
| 0:57.5 | Or a nightmare. |
| 0:59.4 | Welcome to Marooned, harrowing tales of the catastrophically lost. |
| 1:03.4 | I'm Jack Luna. |
| 1:04.8 | This is Aaron Hable. |
| 1:08.2 | Bushman's Hole is a very deep, submerged, freshwater cave, almost 900 feet deep, located near the Kalahari Desert in the northern Cape Province in South Africa. |
| 1:18.9 | It is the third deepest freshwater cave, currently known, and an extremely challenging dive. |
| 1:24.9 | Divers need not only technical diving skills to complete this dive, but specialized |
| 1:29.1 | equipment and gases as well as decompression schedules. To enter the cave, divers must first climb |
| 1:34.9 | down the rocks before reaching the water below and then descend into a narrow tube-like tunnel |
| 1:39.9 | that gets wider and opens up the deeper they descend. The main part of the cave is around 196 feet down. |
| 1:47.9 | Those diving in the cave need to attach a rope to the ceiling of the main cave |
| 1:51.7 | to guide them through the darkness. |
| 1:53.9 | Without that rope and a powerful flashlight, |
| 1:56.7 | one would find themselves disoriented with nothing but darkness in every direction. |
| 2:02.3 | The flashlight not only allows them to see, but also alerts other divers of their presence. |
| 2:08.5 | Good God, Aaron. I'm just going to get this out of the way now. |
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